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00:00Gravity is such a big player in the way interactions occur up your level that when you can remove that you can see the other dominating factors. And when you can see the other dominating factors you can learn more about how to deal with things like cancers and the sorts of evolution within proteins and things of this nature. So from a research perspective it's a huge boon because gravity plays such a big role in the ground you learn so much on orbit from a manufacturing standpoint. There's a number of reasons why manufacturing can can benefit from this. There's a case of something referred to as Z bland fibre it's a fibre that when pulled in in orbit. When you have no gravity so there's no settling you get this very homogeneous material. And in doing that you get performances that are one hundred times the capability of optical fibres made on the ground today in fact the performance is so high you can pass infrared through these fibres and that's a huge market potential there. But you've got to get the costs of getting there and getting back down. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So our objective is to build a facility that's much lower costs increase the access and reduce the complications necessary that typically if we go through today to fly. So we're building an environment that's Plug and Play When you get to orbit we're going to have plugs like you have in your home and in your laboratory on orbit it won't be special spaceflight connectors. The software will be like plugging into your laptop you plug something in the software will know what to do with it. The computers that we're designing for our our module have other kind like your cell phone. They're very very small computers. And when they get old we're not going to go try to build that same computer we're just going to go get the next the latest technology and fly it and users can do the same exact thing. So it's these kinds of steps we're taking to drive the costs down and make access to something also make usability like walking in someone's office or something it's a lot more familiar. Yeah we're trying to drive all the cost down. So today to build a piece of space flight hardware is an enormous expense because you're driven to space qualified parts and and and special specifications for spaceflight and things of this nature that come rightfully so from years of experience with human spaceflight. But what we have found over the years of working on ISIS that there are critical functions that you have to worry about and protect for the environment for instance you've got a whole pressure in the shell and so we'll build that too to the normal space qualifications that you not only have to but all of the research stuff is not space flight critical so we can use components on the ground to the maximum extent possible or those that you can buy on the ground and all you just picked this stuff up a cost goes what you're saying. Absolutely. So in fact when I left the ISIS program that was how we were buying our laptops at the end we were not making any modifications we're buying them basically not at Costco but but on the Internet we bought the exact computer we want. We bought them and flew them and that's . That was a departure from where had been doing for years for laptops on ISIS. And what is the there's so much effort going into space tourism as well I'm thinking of Richard Branson's efforts in particular. What is the role of space tourism in this new space station new building. And that's a great question because you hear about that a lot you hear about individuals wealthy individuals have flown to ISIS there's a handful of those that have done that. And so there is a market for that of course with what Branson is doing and Blue Origin is really giving people opportunity to very very low cost in my opinion to see the curvature of the earth but you experience a very very short period of microgravity you have a limited view although you get to see the blackness of space and there's other ventures doing that the balloon idea that you've seen folks growing as well. So tourism on orbit is still something people knew they want to spend time they want experienced microgravity environment they want to get over feeling ill for the first few hours and then really have that view see the world and be able to talk about it while you're up there and quality time. So there is that market and that is part of the market that we will . What does it have to do with the size of what you're building them. How things are going to be. You just have to be able to accommodate them. Give them a good view. Good good I'm to stay our particular module how seven we'll have seven crew quarters will have life support for seven crew and we're doing that because we want to be able to choose from any of the commercial providers for access to space and the largest one today is a version of the dragon they intend to have seven crew. So we'll procure that service put seven crew and accommodated on orbit and then what's the life expectancy of your space station. Well we're going to build it. It'll have the each structure will be built to 30 years and we expect we'll extend that. But what is unique about our our space station. It starts off as a module at ISIS and the next components come up before ISIS retires and the whole thing separates and then all of the components all the major components will be able to be replaced so we theoretically could stay in orbit forever but it's that kind of be vulnerable design. So if manufacturing takes off which I think it will we can have a special module just for manufacturing. And if the airlock gets old it's been up there 40 years we can't extend the life we can throw that airlock away and put a new one up there . So we expect to be we're building a design that's evolving Bill and essentially can stay in orbit indefinitely Legos in space . It sounds perfect. Very similar to Legos in space except that middle Lego that everything attaches to that's the most challenging one. But we call it the node. But even that one will be a big replace .

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The Case for a Commercial Space Station

Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini discusses his plans to build a commercially-run outpost in space and why there’s a need for continued research aboard a space station. He speaks with Cory Johnson on “Bloomberg Technology.” (Source: Bloomberg)

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